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July 18, 2014

Dear Christians:So God followed me on Twitter this week and reminded me why I'm an atheist

Dear Christians,

God followed me on Twitter this week, and I dutifully followed him back. One of the things he said illuminated one of the main reasons that I am an atheist. The tweet was this one:

It's reasoning like this, which I most often hear espoused by Christians, that reminds me that I know I have come to the right decision.

I'm sorry, but I simply cannot continue to believe in an unjust god.

I know. God's justice is different from our justice, we can't understand the plan, everything happens for a reason, yada yada yada.

I can't deal with it anymore, and I can't continue with the charade anymore, blindly ignoring the voices in my head that scream THIS IS ALL SO FUCKED UP.

Because it is.

Take this example, one that I was given when I questioned the presence of evil in the world while I was growing up: Satan did it. But God created Satan. If he is all-knowing and all-powerful, why would he create a being that would end up destroying his creation and contributing to the distress and death of billions of people?

Job is a great example. Satan kills ten people in Job...because God says he can. Because they made a bet.

And when Job questions, what does he get?

Shut up, how dare you question me? I am god.

No.

We are all cursed, because Adam and Eve screwed up. How is that just? I shoplifted once, a long time ago. I was underage, and I was barred from entering Wal-Mart for five years. Would it have been just for them to bar my children from entering? My grandchildren? My descendants 6,000 years from now? No, it wouldn't.

In a post earlier this week, I talked about God's changeable morality. What was moral then is no longer moral. A popular example is Abraham and Isaac. I'll quote again real quick:

This quote brought to mind a quote I read about Søren Kierkgaard from Fear and Trembling, written in 1843:

If anyone found a man today who was taking his son someplace to murder him because a voice told him to do it, we would attempt to stop him and we would despise the fellow.

Kierkgaard makes it clear that, today, we would consider such an action publicly indefensible. I believe this is quite accurate when you look at the case of the Texas mother that drowned her five children--while some of us may feel sympathetic for what is clearly a mental illness, the vast majority of us also acknowledge that the action is indefensible. This woman needs serious help. And yet, a vast majority of people in our nation look at the story of Abraham and Isaac and believe that it is not only the literal truth, but that it represents the will of an almighty, just God. It simply boggles the mind.

One, we would judge the crap out of Abraham. Two, we would assume he was either mentally ill or worthy of death/life imprisonment. He would, of course, be sentenced to less (it was only attempted murder) and we would decry the unjust system, that is clearly broken.

I am perfectly content with the idea that there is no God, because if the God of the Bible and Christianity today exists, I don't want to believe in him. He is not worthy, in my opinion, of belief or worship.

If I gave birth to a child--created him or her, if you will--and spent his or her entire existence refusing to protect him or her, beating and disparaging him or her whenever I considered the child not to show enough gratitude, if I threw them out in the world to face whatever harm might come to them, I wouldn't be worthy of the title of Mother. People would despise me. People would hate me. People would mock me, bring me to trial, argue that I was a decrepit soul.